Grave ethical problem in MELPA

Grave ethical problem in MELPA

[Richard Stallman]

[[[ To any NSA and FBI agents reading my email: please consider    ]]]
[[[ whether defending the US Constitution against all enemies,     ]]]
[[[ foreign or domestic, requires you to follow Snowden's example. ]]]

I'm told that the MELPA site requires nonfree software:

  > The navigational buttons do nothing while the rest of what would
  > show on the homepage without LibreJS deactivated is absent.

This is unethical and works directly against what we say.  Does anyone
here know the site maintainers well enough to convince them to fix
this?

Please respond if you can try.

-- 
Dr Richard Stallman
President, Free Software Foundation (gnu.org, fsf.org)
Internet Hall-of-Famer (internethalloffame.org)
Skype: No way! See stallman.org/skype.html.

Re: Grave ethical problem in MELPA

[Chad Brown]

> On 11 Aug 2016, at 21:37, Richard Stallman <rms@gnu.org> wrote:
> 
> I'm told that the MELPA site requires nonfree software:
> 
>> The navigational buttons do nothing while the rest of what would
>> show on the homepage without LibreJS deactivated is absent.
> 
> This is unethical and works directly against what we say.  Does anyone
> here know the site maintainers well enough to convince them to fix
> this?
> 
> Please respond if you can try.


The melpa site includes two links at the bottom of the page, one to the source of the page, and one to “Javascript license information”. The second one goes to:

	http://melpa.org/jslicense.html 

This page is totally viewable in eww, and all of the licenses on it seem to be compatible with the GPL according to:

	https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.en.html

That said, I imagine that there might be some troubles with LibreJS identifying javascript libraries correctly; I’ve heard comments that suggest that LibreJS is imperfect at this job so far. 

I don’t use the melpa web site anymore myself, and I don’t have any particular connection to the maintainers there myself.

Hope this helps,
~Chad

Re: Grave ethical problem in MELPA

[Dmitry Gutov]

On 08/12/2016 07:37 AM, Richard Stallman wrote:

> I'm told that the MELPA site requires nonfree software:

This statement is untrue, and we've discussed this before on this list.

> This is unethical and works directly against what we say.  Does anyone
> here know the site maintainers well enough to convince them to fix
> this?

They have an issue filed to have their site work with LibreJS: 
https://github.com/melpa/melpa/issues/3731

 From reading the comments, they've contacted the LibreJS maintainer, 
and there had been some positive exchange. I don't know whether any 
problems remain, and why.

Re: Grave ethical problem in MELPA

[Uwe Brauer]

>>> "Dmitry" == Dmitry Gutov <dgutov@yandex.ru> writes:

   > On 08/12/2016 07:37 AM, Richard Stallman wrote:
   >> I'm told that the MELPA site requires nonfree software:

   > This statement is untrue, and we've discussed this before on this list.

I agree, I just have added
 
 (add-to-list 'package-archives
              '("melpa" . "http://melpa.org/packages/") t)

To my init file and can use MELPA without any fancy java script business.

LibreJS doesn't detect free software licenses with 100% accuracy (was: Grave ethical problem in MELPA)

[Clément Pit--Claudel]

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On 2016-08-12 00:37, Richard Stallman wrote:
> [[[ To any NSA and FBI agents reading my email: please consider    ]]]
> [[[ whether defending the US Constitution against all enemies,     ]]]
> [[[ foreign or domestic, requires you to follow Snowden's example. ]]]
> 
> I'm told that the MELPA site requires nonfree software:
> 
>   > The navigational buttons do nothing while the rest of what would
>   > show on the homepage without LibreJS deactivated is absent.
> 
> This is unethical and works directly against what we say.  Does anyone
> here know the site maintainers well enough to convince them to fix
> this?

Richard, why do you keep coming back to this? The MELPA website *does not* require running non-free software. I don't think it ever did, and there doesn't seem to be plans for it to ever do.  The people who run MELPA are providing excellent service to the entire Emacs community, in a way that aligns entirely with what we say.

Let's please stop equating "doesn't work with LibreJS" and "isn't free software". The quote you give only proves that the MELPA website doesn't work with LibreJS.  (Which is hardly an issue, btw: you don't need to browse this website to download packages from MELPA)

Clément.






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Re: Grave ethical problem in MELPA

[Richard Stallman]

[[[ To any NSA and FBI agents reading my email: please consider    ]]]
[[[ whether defending the US Constitution against all enemies,     ]]]
[[[ foreign or domestic, requires you to follow Snowden's example. ]]]

  > The melpa site includes two links at the bottom of the page, one to the source of the page, and one to “Javascript license information”. The second one goes to:

  > 	http://melpa.org/jslicense.html 

  > This page is totally viewable in eww, and all of the licenses on it seem to be compatible with the GPL according to:

I stand corrected.  Someone reported the problem to me
and I didn't remember the previous discussion.

  > They have an issue filed to have their site work with LibreJS: 
  > https://github.com/melpa/melpa/issues/3731

I am glad to hear that.

-- 
Dr Richard Stallman
President, Free Software Foundation (gnu.org, fsf.org)
Internet Hall-of-Famer (internethalloffame.org)
Skype: No way! See stallman.org/skype.html.